How to Build an Audience for Your Information Product Business

Let’s talk about the widest “net” we can cast as a marketer because let’s face it, the vast majority (and I do mean VAST majority) of those you could help, don’t know you exist.

If they don’t know you exist, they can’t become a lead, buyer, or high-ticket buyer.

Let’s have a look at the Attention stage in the Business Growth Framework:

Let’s begin by exploring the content you have available to you at the Attention stage.

Types of Content at the Attention Stage

You have four products available to you, as an information business, at the ATTENTION stage:

Blog – The part of your website where you publish educational, inspirational, and/or entertaining content in written, verbal or video form.

Podcast – Usually audio (sometimes video) content that is distributed through podcasting networks like iTunes, Stitcher, etc.

Video Sharing – The dominant player in this space is, of course, YouTube — the second largest search engine on the planet behind Google.

Social – Publishing content to sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Before we take a deeper dive on each of these product types, let’s look at some things all Attention products have in common:

Characteristics of Attention Content

While a blog article might seem much different from a podcast episode or a YouTube video — they actually have quite a bit in common.

Characteristic 1: Stand-Alone Value

Each piece of content you produce at the ATTENTION stage should provide value in the form of education, inspiration, or entertainment. Your audience should not need to buy a product from you to get value from your blog post, video, or podcast episode.

In other words, don’t try to sell a car with no steering wheel. The piece of content needs to have stand-alone value.

Characteristic 2: Prospect Magnet

Each podcast, blog post, video or social media update you make should attract your ideal customer.

For example, if your goal is to sell a $19/month membership product (MONETIZATION) to people in business management, a podcast episode (ATTENTION) about firing employees would attract the ideal prospect.

Or, if you’re selling a print book (ACQUISITION), a picture of a page in that book will make a great piece of content for Instagram (ATTENTION).

Characteristic 3: Ascends

Failure to provide your audience with the next step is not just bad marketing, it’s a bad user experience.

Every piece of content you produce (within reason) should include a call-to-action (CTA) to get more from you. Wherever possible, make a call-to-action to the next step in the 4-Step Audience Ascension Ladder.

Ok, let’s take a closer look at the content that can raise awareness for your information business.

Content that Generates Attention: A Closer Look

Blog

I have yet to run across a business that couldn’t benefit from a blog. Blogs are incredibly flexible content machines that can host text, audio, video, and image-based content.

Pros of Blogs

• Since the blog is on your website, posting content and driving traffic to it is an investment in a property you own.

Cons of Blogs:

• It can be difficult to drive traffic to a blog, particularly when you are just getting started. Organic traffic (read: free or, more accurately, not paid advertising) from search engine optimization (SEO) and social media channels takes time and effort to pay dividends. You might need to buy traffic to the content you produce on your blog. If you do, just remember to use ad retargeting to make a Subscription, Acquisition, or Monetization offer.

Podcast

The opportunity to gain attention with podcasting is increasing as podcasts become more and more mainstream.

Video Sharing

YouTube is a search engine with a reach second only to its owner, Google.

Social

Access millions billions of potential customers by tapping into the mega-websites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

How to Get Traffic to Your Attention Content

You have three traffic tactics at your disposal at the Attention stage:

• Search
• Social
• Advertising

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Search

As click costs from paid traffic channels like Facebook and Google Ads continue to rise, there has been a renewed interest in “free” traffic from search engines.

Rather than referring to this traffic as “free”, I prefer to refer to it as earned. This term is better because it communicates the effort needed to rank for any keyword phrases that matter in the search engines of today.

Search engines are everywhere today. Your potential customers are searching for content in “vertical” search engines like iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Social

While you can post content on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest — you can also post a little bit of teaser copy and a link to consume, for example, content on your blog.

I call this “bouncing.” Any time you use one channel (let’s say Facebook) to drive traffic to another channel (say YouTube), you are bouncing traffic. You can bounce people from a podcast to an email list or from an email list to Facebook Messenger. Bouncing is a good practice because it diversifies the number of channels you have to reach your audience.

Advertising

As competition for attention continues to increase, buying traffic to your ATTENTION content has become more and more standard practice. For many, it’s not feasible to hope and pray for search engines and social media will send you the traffic you’ll need.

If you have the rest of the Business Growth Framework in place (particularly the Monetization piece), you will be able to see the path toward a Return on Investment (ROI) on the advertising dollars you’re spending.

So, that’s how you build an audience at the Attention stage. Easy peasy, right? 

Remember, I didn’t say it was going to be easy — I said it would be worth it!  

Ok, so where should you start? In Chapter 5 I’ll show you what product to build first so you don’t waste any time or energy.  It’s not likely where you think.